excerpt from Neverland

The hearse ascended the mountain effortlessly as an angel. Pine and aspen shot into an artery of cold, raven-dotted sky. For convenience, the driver had picked her up three dozen miles below at the airport hotel—to taxi all this way would cost an arm and a leg, and Sylvia didn’t drive. She and the hearse had the same destination, anyway.

At mountaintop, the city limits sign of her childhood village was in a different place. She closed her eyes behind oversized sunglasses and kept them shut until the hearse came to a gentle, gravel-paved stop at the chapel.

Sylvia proceeded to the small building, from which six men streamed to buoy the casket inside. She rested on the hard wooden bench outside the pastor’s office, where she’d sat 29 years ago, waiting for advice. She hadn’t returned since. Now, she held up one hand to block the casket’s entrance and stared ahead at the wall through black lenses.

Not surprisingly, there was a different pastor after 24 years. She wondered whether he had a file on her, as the rest of the world did, not letting her escape the information it clung to? Maybe God had spread out her sins for the pastor, the hand she’d played coloring his view of this funeral and burial, of which Sylvia found herself the highly unlikely overseer.